Lately, all my primary technology news sources have been polluted with articles about Twitter and URL shortening services. A part of my dies inside every time I hear about one of these. I can understand the hype about Twitter, but the only reason there is a hype about URL shortening is because of Twitter.

I have an open suggestion to Twitter that would benefit them, their user base, and hopefully kill the URL Shortening market space in one go. (so it would be one less thing to pollute my daily tech news with).

Solution

Twitter, implement your own shortening service and integrate it with the service. There is #hashtags, and there is @mentions. Using the same convention and use either ! % or ^ to implement URL redirection.

Example

"Hey @person, go check out ^s89n3"

If a user wants to shorten the url http://www.janitha.com, the service would map that url to a code such as "1a2b3c". Now if a user enters ^1a2b3c, it links directly to the original URL (or links to something like http://www.twitter.com/redir/1a2b3c that redirects to the correct place). It's really trivial, everyone and their grandmother is implementing URL Shortening services, so I am sure you can spare a fraction of your millions in funding to implement this simple feature.